


The other A. Minyard

by defractum (nyargles)



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 14:19:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11922684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/defractum
Summary: Aaron had had plans, you know?He hadn’t meant for his life to get derailed with brothers and Exy and cute cheerleaders with sharp minds and soft hands. But it did anyway, and this is how it happened, sort of.A character study on Aaron Minyard.





	The other A. Minyard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anclrewjosten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anclrewjosten/gifts).



> An AFTG exchange pinch-hit for anclrewjosten.

Aaron had had plans, you know?

He hadn’t meant for his life to get derailed with brothers and Exy and cute cheerleaders with sharp minds and soft hands. But it did anyway, and this is how it happened, sort of.

Aaron’s first goal in life, the first that he remembers anyway, was that he was going to be rich. Even as a seven year old, he’s practical about it – he doesn’t want to be millionaire, or a singer or any of that crap. No, he just needs to have a job that pays well and means that he can buy his mom a house probably somewhere far away from him and keep her supplied with the bags of stuff that makes her in a fuzzy good mood and stops her from hitting him.

It isn’t his first, or second, or even the sixth hospital visit by the time Aaron is twelve and in the ER, waiting to be seen for his broken arm. His mom is fast running out of hospitals in the local area, and they had driven for almost an hour to get to this one. He’s taken way more Advil than he’s meant to, but he’s still hazy with how long he’d been in pain by the time he gets seen to.

A nurse calls for Thomas and it takes Aaron a moment to register that that’s his name for today; Tilda stands up with him as she always did so he won’t tell anyone that he’d been thrown down the stairs, and the nurse says breezily, _Oh, he’s old enough to be seen by himself. Why don’t you just stay here and read some of the magazines? We won’t be long!_ and slides them through the doors before Tilda can protest.

Aaron knows that a lot of people hate hospitals, but he doesn’t get why. The door closes behind him and the noise from the ER waiting room fades away. The air-con is on high and it’s cool and quiet and peaceful in here. The people here never hurt him. They speak to him like he understands what they’re saying, and he nods along when they tell him how to take care of his new cast.

He tells them he’d fallen off one of the climbing frames at the park and that his name is Thomas, and they tell him that he has a lot of bruises, some that seem much older, and that if he’s in danger, it would be okay, he could tell them.

They can’t help him – Aaron’s plan doesn’t involve getting thrashed by his mom for ratting her out – but they take his fake name and they try, and Aaron remembers that, at least.

By the time Aaron’s fourteen, he contemplates dropping out of school so he can work and start buying drugs quicker. He’s got good grades – pretty much straight As aside from an occasional bad assignment or two – because he knows it’s much easier getting into a good college and getting a good job if he has a good track record, but it’s hard to care about the grades sometimes when they won’t help his life for years in the future, and he needs to get out of this life _now_.

Tilda hasn’t looked at his school records for years now; Aaron had always forged her signature on anything that needed it. His teacher-parent conferences always run the same way: his teacher would smile at the sight of them, and start by saying what a pleasure it was to have Aaron in their class, how hard he worked, and Tilda would ask why the hell she needed to be here then.

He still thinks about being a doctor, sometimes. He likes the sciences, they’re logical, and he’s old enough now to know that it could be good money. Mostly he thinks about it’d be easier to prescribe himself painkillers if he were a doctor.

Most of Aaron’s childhood has been him, his mom, and her string of boyfriends. Tilda wasn’t close to her family, and he’s only visited his Uncle Luther and his family a few times. They go for Thanksgiving one year; his mom gets high in the bathroom before they sit down to say grace, and when he reaches out to hold hands around the circle – a step behind everyone else because Lord knows Tilda doesn’t give a shit about God – his t-shirt shifts enough for the yellow-green handprints around his neck to slide into view. Everyone sees them, and only his cousin Nicky looks at him with eyes wide.

Luther says something about how thankful he is that Tilda and Aaron can join them this year since they won’t get much family time soon as Nicky’s going somewhere for specialist education. Nicky smiles a very strained smile, and Aaron isn’t stupid enough not to realise that holding hands and praying over turkey doesn’t make a damned bit of difference in the end. Tilda’s still high, he still has bruises under his t-shirt and Nicky’s smile is carefully painted on a too-fragile face that threatens to crack at any second.

And then comes Andrew.

They move to a new place so Tilda could move in with her latest boyfriend, Aaron finds out he has a twin brother and said twin brother then lands himself in _juvenile detention_. Aaron spends as little time at home as possible – he lurks around the library, sort of accidentally getting the best grades he has for a while, and joins the school Exy team because it was good for his pent-up anger and no one bats an eye at an Exy player having bruises – and soon enough, Andrew is finally released.

Aaron doesn’t know how to deal with him. He resents him for not being there, not growing up with him so he had someone to help him with Tilda – and then immediately feels guilty that he would wish Tilda on anyone else. Andrew is just as broken as him but in a different way, and it feels like looking into a fractured mirror; he can’t make sense of him at all.

And then Tilda is dead and Aaron is relieved, so, so relieved, and angry, and sad, and Andrew is – nothing. He’s like stone. Aaron rages against him like a tidal wave against a barricade, and Andrew stands strong against him. He ransacks the fucking house and locks Aaron in the bathroom as Aaron scrabbles at the empty space where the painkillers usually are, uncomprehending. (They don’t help with that kind of pain, the part of his brain still rational tells him, but he doesn’t care. He needs them.)

He spends the better part of a week delirious. He doesn’t really remember most of it, he just remembers crying a lot, more than he had ever dared to cry when Tilda was alive. He remembers trying to climb out of the bathroom window, which was far too small for him anyway, with no plan as to how he was going to get from a second storey window to the ground, and Andrew physically hauling him back inside and throwing him into the bathtub. He remembers punching Andrew with tremoring limbs. He remembers throwing up a lot. Most of all, he remembers how much pain he was in, and how, even after the shaking and the cramps stopped, the pain never goes away.

It takes him a long time to learn how to distinguish pain in his head from pain in his body again.

They move in with Uncle Luther, who tells both of them that he’s disappointed that neither of them had been educated properly in religion. He locks eyes with Andrew and feels hysterical laughter roiling up inside himself, which he locks down until they’re in the room they’re sharing – Nicky’s old room – and they carefully let it out in smothered gurgles as they press their hands to their mouths.

It’s the first and last time he sees Andrew laugh properly, not because of the shitty medication he’s on, until their second year at Palmetto.

Andrew grows quiet and cold – or even quieter and colder – around Luther at some point but before Aaron can press about it, Nicky turns out. He hasn’t seen Nicky in a few years at this point, but he looks a lot happier than before. Aaron hates him for it, and then hates himself for thinking that. It turns out he had arrived out of the blue asking to take care of them instead.

It’s a fight, because Nicky is only a few years older than them but Nicky fights for it, proving that he can get a house and provide for them and they’re old enough now that Social Services ask what they want. Andrew says that he doesn’t _want_ anything, but he’ll live with Nicky so Aaron goes too. They end up in Columbia, which is away from Tilda and away from Luther and they start a new school, again.

Tilda’s life insurance comes through, and Aaron’s honestly surprised to hear that she even had life insurance. Half of it goes to Andrew. Andrew offers it to Aaron first – he’s never considered Tilda his mother – but Aaron tells him to keep it. It’s more money than he’d ever thought he’d have, and he’d only ever wanted to be rich so he could provide for Tilda so she’d leave him alone anyway.

He can’t afford med school with this, but he could get an undergraduate degree. He puts his money away, and considers college in a new light.

He joins the Exy team, again, because it’s good to have extra-curriculars for college applications, and Andrew goes with him because they’re a package deal now even if they can barely exchange two civil words. Nicky puts his college education and life with Erik on hold to become a server at a diner, and then a bartender at a club to support them and refuses to let Aaron feel bad about it at all. Aaron (and by extension, Andrew) gets a part-time job too – because it looks good on college applications, he insists, even as he pitches in for the groceries every other week.

Andrew gets half a dozen offers from colleges for Exy scholarships and he turns them all down. Aaron has no idea what he’s planning to do with his life but it’s still grating to see him get things handed to him on a plate and watch him swat it carelessly off the table like a cat.

Andrew skips practice after school one day – not unusual in itself – but Aaron can’t find him for his ride afterwards, and that is weird. Aaron texts him, and Nicky, irritated. He doesn’t text back, but he does drive in ten minutes later, the car idling as he waits for Aaron to cram himself in. He doesn’t apologise, but then again, Aaron doesn’t expect him to.

They get home and Andrew tosses three garishly orange folders onto the table, one in front of Aaron and one in front of Nicky. Full ride to college, he tells them.

 _What the fuck_ says Aaron.

But Andrew will only go if they all go, and Nicky looks vaguely misty-eyed at the idea of going back to college and, well. He supposes he can save that money for med school then.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr](http://defractum.tumblr.com)!


End file.
